Twitter is a wonderful platform that enables us to connect with people from around the world within seconds and has found many uses: from marketing applications over social empowerment to newsfeeds we have found innumerable ways to make something out of 140 characters. But at the same time most users don't realize their thoughts are being announced for the whole Internet to see.

The cloudphone goes one step further, building a bridge between the Internet and the real world by providing an interface to communicate without having to carry a multimedia device around.

At random times, the phone rings for a minute or until somebody picks up the handset. A tweet will then be read to the user which can either repeat it (the synthetic voice is bad with hashtags) or send some feedback back to the original poster of this tweet. The tweets that are being read to the users can be relevant to the location the cloudphone is situated: Conferences, hackerspaces or in a public space.

At the heart an eeePC 701 runs a python script to manage the tweets, festival text-to-speech reads them and an arduino handles the buttons. Code isn't shiny, but available at https://github.com/themoep/cloudphone

Ideas, criticism and random comments are welcome!